


pas de deux

by silkinsilence



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angela "Mercy" Ziegler - Freeform, Background characters:, Ballet as a Plot Device, Brainwashing, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dark, Gérard Lacroix - Freeform, Heavy Angst, Moiramaker is very background, Multi, Psychological Torture, Reaper | Gabriel Reyes - Freeform, Sombra (Overwatch) - Freeform, Torture, and a torture device!, ish, jesse mccree - Freeform, really a very unpleasant fic all around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 11:35:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14354652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkinsilence/pseuds/silkinsilence
Summary: A dance for a human weapon and the woman who made her.





	pas de deux

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello welcome to whatever this is
> 
> in case you didn't read the tags, be advised that this is quite an unpleasant fic containing references to physical/emotional torture. there is no non-con of a sexual nature but be advised that there are scenes such as forced undressing and washing. there is also a brief scene depicting animal abuse/death. if any of this sounds like something you don't wanna read, please don't continue. this fic pretty much centers around Moira breaking and subjugating Amélie's mind, body, and will, so...
> 
> if you don't listen to [swan lake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZfoK25lnY&t=6174s) while reading this then what's even the point
> 
> a song that provided a great deal of inspiration for this fic is _[the fires i started](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHLjtIPuzj0)_[ by unwoman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHLjtIPuzj0)

“How does it feel, Madame Lacroix?”

Angela Ziegler’s voice is slightly distorted by the static of the video connection but unmistakable nonetheless. As always when on duty, she is the consummate professional. Moira watches the screen and wonders if Ziegler likes the woman. Amélie Lacroix is beautiful, with the slender form and broken feet of a ballerina. She seems standoffish, but that could just be the imperious cast of her features. Perhaps Moira is simply looking for flaws where there are none to be found. Perhaps she is trying to retroactively justify a decision she has already made and a contract to which she has already agreed.

“Good,” Lacroix says. Her voice is smooth, pleasant to listen to even with the network distortion. “Your work is remarkable as always.”

All Moira can see is the back of Ziegler’s head, so it’s up to her to speculate whether her fellow physician blushes. The security cameras in the main medical bay are positioned high up in the corners of the room. They are intended to monitor for threats. They were not meant for this voyeuristic observation.

Ziegler’s work _is_ remarkable, though there are far more impressive applications for it than treating a dancer’s ruined feet. Still, Lacroix is fortunate. Any ballerina would be envious of her free access to the best medical researchers in the world, to technology that makes her infected blisters heal and her strained muscles rejuvenate.

Moira shuts off her illicit stream of the medbay feed. She is left only with music playing in the background. It’s been Puccini and Handel and Dvořák for the past weeks. She’s watched as many videos of Lacroix performing as she can find. She has seen her execute each turn, each leap, with exact precision. The control she has over her body is truly astounding. Can a dancer become a soldier? Moira formulates a case based on that. She tries to find logic in it.

The violins begin to grate. Moira closes the tab and closes her eyes. A figure pirouettes in her mind. A dancer’s stage life is so limited anyway. The body decays and falls apart; even Ziegler’s treatments cannot prevent that. It is hardly premature to break her now.

There is no logic in it. Not her sort of logic, anyway.

Perhaps any ballerina would not be so jealous of Madame Lacroix after all.

* * *

The building houses offices aboveground. Its basement isn’t listed on city floorplans. The occupants of the upper floors walk in and out everyday, blithely unaware of what amounts to a bunker under their feet. They do not know that they share office space with one of the more notorious terrorist organizations plaguing the globe. They do not know that a woman famous both for her career as a ballerina and for her marriage to a high-ranking member of Overwatch is being kept there.

But Moira knows.

“ _We’ll store her in Z_ _ü_ _rich,”_ her contact said during the SVoSIP call. _“To make it convenient for you.”_

She wondered whether there actually was a laugh in his voice or if it was just her own guilty conscience. But she must acknowledge that none of it feels real until she is standing in a steel-reinforced room and staring at the woman she’s been intensely researching over the past months.

Maybe she had assumed it all was a joke in poor taste. The interaction could have been a test of loyalty, which she’d utterly failed. The hefty sum of money certain to disappear the next morning.

But the room is real. Moira had the guards, Talon lackeys, stay outside. Lacroix is huddled in the corner between cold steel-reinforced walls. Her hands are bound and tied to a ring affixed to the wall. The skin around her wrists is purple and red from pulling against her bonds.

Tchaikovsky wafts gently through the room from hidden speakers.

Moira wears a lab coat, white and crisp and professional, over her button-down. She has stuffed her Overwatch identification badge into the breast pocket. The insignia is just visible when she leans over, and this conversation will undoubtedly force her to lean over.

Amélie Lacroix is beautiful as she glares up at Moira. Her hair is greasy and her eyes bloodshot and the terror evident just beyond the mask of anger, but still she is beautiful.

Or perhaps it’s not her. Perhaps it’s that Moira is no longer looking at a person but at an experiment, and there is always beauty in those.

“ _Qui êtes-vous?_ ” she spits. Moira has spent long enough in Switzerland that she probably should know what that means, but then again most of her time is spent in her laboratory and not out in the city. Still, she doesn’t need precise words to understand the gist.

“I’m here to help you, Ms. Lacroix,” she says briskly. “Your cooperation is appreciated.”

“ _Va te faire foutre.”_ She only looks angrier. An enraged swan with her wings cut off. Soon, very soon, Moira will grow on her.

Overwatch’s central base is barely a handful of kilometers away. Lacroix does not know it, but she is so close to help. Real help. So close to her husband. She does not know it, but the woman who stands before her could end her torment with a call to the right people. The thought occurs to Moira, and she considers it for more than a moment as if she hasn’t already decided to sell her soul.

The flutes and violins trill an uplifting melody.

Lacroix struggles against the physical examination. Moira has to call the guards in to hold her down. Still she spits out insults, threats, strings of French. Her fear seems to manifest as fury. Moira takes her time. Ophthalmoscope. Blood pressure cuff. Throat swab. This is as much an intimidation as it is a medical procedure. Lacroix does not belong to herself any longer. She is Talon’s.

Moira’s.

There is nothing surprising. Lacroix is in excellent health, though her feet, with Ziegler’s last treatment a few weeks removed, are a grisly sight.

She will not dance again. Her feet will heal properly, finally. She will not waste herself on the stage. It is easy for Moira to pretend this is a kindness as she delivers her orders and leaves the cell to return to her quarters on base. She will eat a very late dinner and sleep well tonight. Lacroix will not sleep at all; thus are the guards’ instructions. She will sit in her corner while the light blares harshly down and the ballets she has performed on the stage ring in her ears.

Moira tries to swallow down the nausea. She tells herself it is the over-bright light of the cell and not the protest of a conscience she has tried to squash.

* * *

“You’ve been heading off-base a lot.”

She does not hear her commander’s approach. Her heart jumps into her throat and she almost drops dead of fright then and there. Her external demeanor remains mostly unchanged; she manages not to drop the delicate glass tubing she’s been working on.

It must take a good thirty seconds for her breathing to level and her heart rate to return to a stable pulse. Reyes simply stands and watches her with a raised eyebrow. Undoubtedly he knows the effect his sudden appearance had on her; undoubtedly it was calculated. But if he’s amused, he hides it well behind his stern countenance. He’s not in tactical gear but rather in the more comfortable clothes he prefers around base.

“I’m sorry; what was that?”

She heard him properly the first time. She merely needs a few more moments to collect her scattered thoughts. She has prepared for this eventuality. She just wasn’t expecting it so soon, or in the middle of the afternoon in the lab as she works alone.

“Where have you been going these past few weeks? Not like you.”

He leans casually against the table. The question sounds conversational as well. It’s really only his eyes, steady and unwavering, that give him away. That, and the fact that she’s worked under him long enough to know that Gabriel Reyes considers nothing casual. He acquires and weighs every detail with focus and intensity.

Moira readies her words. They feel solid on her tongue.

“I’ve been seeing someone.”

The feeling of skin underneath her own, human but much too cool, is only a phantom. There are no trumpets playing a triumphal melody here in the lab. There is no stench of sweat and blood.

Lacroix hovers phantasmal between them. A secret Reyes does not know about. A hostage whom all of Overwatch is desperate to recover.

And Moira holds her life in her hands.

Reyes raises his eyebrows.

“Seeing someone?”

“Yes,” Moira says, terse, impatient.

“Never pegged you for a social butterfly.”

“Because I am not one. It’s just... _dates._ ”

He remains standing there, looking at her. Moira looks back down at her work. Her hands are not sweating. Her heart is not going too fast. These are practiced lies. If he suspected her, there would be some giveaway, some break in her commander’s steadfast façade. It is comforting to believe she would notice. To believe she is perfect, as her experiment will be.

“What is she like?” he asks.

Moira snorts and draws her lips into a thin line.

“Tell me about your dates, Commander, and I’ll tell you about mine.”

He chuckles and straightens and at last turns to leave. He’s at the door and Moira is breathing steady again, feeling like she’s gotten away with murder, when he has the final word.

“I guess they can’t be bad if you’re getting back in at five in the morning.”

The door closes behind him. The locking mechanism beeps. She stares after him with her lips parted and uneasiness gripping her again.

Surely it is just her own paranoia, she tries to tell herself, that gave that sentence the cadence of a warning.

* * *

Lacroix is an awful sight. Her hair is greasy and matted. Her eyes are bloodshot and one of them dark with bruising. Her lips are chapped to the point of cracking. Sleep and sensory deprivation have left their mark on her. Her face is hollow, nearly vacant. But when she sees Moira, light flashes in the depths of her eyes, and then the tears are flowing over. The restraints are no longer necessary; she runs to Moira’s arms and digs her nails into her coat. She will get snot and tears and the sweat and grime of the past few days on her clothes, but Moira doesn’t object. She wraps her arms around the shaking woman.

“What a state you’re in,” she says, and clicks her tongue reprovingly. “We can’t have you crying.”

Horror overtakes Lacroix’s face for an instant, and then she’s backing away, shaking her head.

“ _Désolé_ , I’m sorry, please—”

She weathers the electrical shocks better than she did the last time. She does not sob any longer. Nor does she cry out, though when they’re done her lip is dripping blood from the effort of staying silent. She does not go to Moira’s touch this time. She stands still and limp, like a rag doll.

The bathroom is austere but clean. Lacroix no longer objects to Moira’s presence. She pulls her clothes off and waits. Her face is blank. She stares at nothing as Moira pulls off her lab coat and unbuttons her shirt.

She leaves her undershirt and trousers on, though she rolls up the cuffs. A modesty denied her experiment. She would be fine undressing completely, would honestly prefer it to getting her clothing soggy. But there are power differentials to be enforced.

Lacroix is shivering violently before Moira turns on the water. It warms quickly.

This is unnecessary. Given the necessary supplies, she would doubtless wash herself. This is a woman accustomed to cleanliness, to luxury. The humiliation of the buildup of oil and sweat and blood and filth on her skin is undoubtedly unbearable. But as she is denied control in her cell while Moira is gone, so she is denied it here.

She stays utterly stiff as Moira lathers soap onto a washcloth. She is limp, doll-like, letting Moira move her as she wills. Neck. Shoulders. Back. Muscular. Thinner now than she should be. Moira traces her ribs and thinks of the diet regimen they’ll establish when this unpleasant phase is over. Waist. Then the front. Breasts. Stomach. Lacroix does not move. Neither of them speak. The water makes the only sound.

Her pubic hair is growing out, Moira observes, as she washes between her experiment’s legs. And she is pleased that there is no tensing this time. Lacroix remains limp as Moira moves on downward.

When her charge is clean, she fetches clean clothes. The garments are shapeless and baggy. The uniform of a prisoner. But clean clothes are more pleasant than the alternative.

“Thank you,” Lacroix says quietly, averting her eyes.

“I care about you,” Moira says. “I want you in perfect condition, whatever it takes.”

“Just tell me what you want, please, I’ll do whatever—”

Moira cuts her off.

“Don’t ask. Just learn.”

Lacroix falls silent. Her face shows the fear of earlier, but Moira doesn’t insist on punishment this time. A varied reinforcement schedule is the most effective. They have already made such progress. She doesn’t like administering the shocks, anyway. Lacroix isn’t yet to the point where she understands they’re for her own good. She does not yet understand that the bedrock of her world has fundamentally shifted. For her own sake, perhaps it’s best that she doesn’t understand that. This captivity is indeed temporary, but not in the way she thinks.

A dancer spins on the stage of Moira’s mind. She takes a bow before the audience’s standing ovation. None of them know what happens next.

In the main cell Lacroix’s meal is waiting for her in a small bottle of nutrition-replacement liquid. She sits cross-legged on the floor and drinks slowly. Her appetite has undoubtedly been discombobulated by her circumstance and the feeding schedule. Perhaps she’s grown used to the days-long gap between meals.

Moira sits behind her and combs her wet hair. Lacroix leans into her touch, consciously or not. She has fallen so easily. Flown into a cage.

“Please, can you turn it off,” Lacroix asks stiffly.

“Turn what off?”

“The _music._ ”

Tchaikovsky’s _Swan Lake_ fills the cell. Moira wasn’t familiar at all with the ballet until this all began, but the hours spent in Lacroix’s company have changed that. Now the dulcet clarinet and the wistful violin ring familiar in her ears. She likes it, or she would under different circumstances.

“I don’t have any control over it,” she lies. “I’m sorry.”

Lacroix is silent for several minutes. She takes slow sips as if trying to make the bottle last. Moira would like to tell her that the limited feeding schedule is only for now, that eventually she will be given precisely the nutrition her body requires. That soon she will not be afraid or scared or in pain. Moira wishes she could impart her vision directly into the woman sitting in front of her.

But she would not understand.

“Can’t you help me?” Lacroix finally says. Her voice is a low and desperate whisper. She doesn’t know that Moira is the only one with access to video feed of this cell anyway. Unknown unknowns.

“I’m trying to help you,” Moira says. The comb catches on a snarl. She gently holds the hair above and works through it. It’s been decades since her own hair came past her shoulders, and at times like this she is reminded of how much she doesn’t miss it.

“Why do you—” Lacroix swallows. She shakes. The bottle sits empty on the ground. The comb traverses from her scalp down to her mid-back. The fluorescents reflect off her wet hair. Moira’s hands move in a steady pattern. And the music plays on. “Why do you have an Overwatch ID?”

Moira puts down the comb. She leans forward, pressing their bodies together. Lacroix is stiff as a board, but she does not pull away, even when Moira’s breath brushes warm against her ear.

“It’s not just your life at stake, Madame Lacroix.”

Lacroix nods hurriedly. Her eyes are closed tightly.

“Please—please—”

“You won’t believe me.”

“ _Please_ ,” Lacroix echoes. A desperate and broken sound. Perhaps enough to sway the heart of the woman Moira is pretending to be.

She sighs, long and slow.

“Overwatch pursues many research ventures. Suppose they wished to further research into creation of a human weapon. Suppose that a member high in the ranks could provide a physically-fit specimen.”

It takes a few seconds, but Lacroix understands. She jerks away from Moira, knocking over the bottle in the process. A few drops of nondescript beige liquid drip out. She shakes her head back and forth, teeth gritted in an obscene grimace.

“ _Ferme-la, ferme-la, ferme—_ ”

Moira stands. She towers over Lacroix like this.

“I am trying to help you,” she repeats. “As much as I can. You would be wise to listen to me.”

Lacroix curls in on herself like a puppet with its strings cut. Her hair fans out on the hard floor. But she isn’t crying. Moira can see her face, turned to one side, her eyes wide. She knows that tears will earn punishment. Probably she knows that she’s already earned it, and that even trying to maintain her composure is a waste. But she does not cry, and that is reassuring.

“Gérard,” she mumbles. “Gérard.”

“It has been months, Lacroix,” Moira says. A lie, but the stimulants and the isolation of her cell will make it a convincing one. “You know now where he is. Why he isn’t coming for you.”

Lacroix does not move or respond. She closes her eyes. Moira lets out a long sigh once more, waits a few seconds, and then leaves the cell.

Continued sensory deprivation, she tells the guards. The music also will continue.

* * *

Their target is a Talon outpost near Ashgabat. Turkmenistan was one of the few countries that voted to disband Overwatch after the crisis and then outlawed the organization from conducting any activities within its borders. Of course, given the stealth with which Blackwatch operates regardless, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Reyes gave them the same speech he always does before they flew out from base, reminding them all that they could expect no help from the broader organization if they were caught. Their existence will remain a secret. Saving the world from behind a curtain.

Moira finds the climate detestable. The air seems to be leaching every last drop of water from her skin. Her hands are dry and cracking by the third day. She’s stuck inside with most of the rest of the team. Agent Kovrova is doing the legwork, masquerading as a Russian tourist while the rest of them sit around.

“Wish I could see the desert,” McCree comments. It’s verging on the end of the first week and cabin fever has them all on edge. He’s taken to pacing. Moira presses a button on her earpiece to lower the volume (No. 10 Scène: Moderato) in order to listen.

“Look up pictures online and just shut up.” Aberman’s face is set in its usual scowl. The puzzle book open in her lap has clearly done a poor job of easing her temper.

“Shame not to visit while we’re here. There’s that pit, the one they call a gate to Hell. You can’t tell me that don’t sound at least a little intruigin’.”

“We should take a field trip. See where we’re all headed,” Reyes speaks up. That gets a chuckle out of them all, even Moira. “Now stop pacing. And O’Deorain, stop that damn humming.”

The directive catches her by surprise. She hadn’t really noticed. The music has lodged itself inside her. She’s only listening to it because it would play in her mind either way. It is a reminder of a woman thousands of kilometers away. Here in Ashgabat she will help execute a strike against Talon, and then she will return to Zürich and continue developing their human weapon.

A dangerous game. Probably a foolish one.

“ _I am traveling for work,”_ she told Lacroix. “ _Behave in my absence.”_

She had been rewarded with a stiff nod and cold, flat eyes.

The mission is more suspenseful for her teammates: they believe there is a chance they will find Amélie Lacroix in this particular Talon nest. They believe there is still a chance for her to be rescued.

Unknown unknowns.

She sees her experiment whenever she closes her eyes. She thinks of her during these cramped and dry nights while they all struggle to fall asleep. She sees choices stretching out before them. Is her current methodology effective? Will she be on the schedule she envisioned when this first began? At what phase is introducing weaponry advisable? Would it be wise to introduce slaughtering animals as a lead-in to killing humans?

What if she fails?

Her mind’s eye fixates on Amélie Lacroix. She sees her nude, pirouetting on stage. Holding a rifle aloft. Her face perfectly smooth and cold, wiped clean of any emotion. The bruises are gone from her body. Her stomach is no longer a concavity; it is no longer necessary. Physical coercion, the method of brutes, has outlived its usefulness. Now she simply does as she is bidden because it is how she has been reprogrammed.

Moira envisions perfection. That is more than enough to keep her mind occupied in this stuffy room underground. Her teammates shift and rib each other and prepare for the inevitable clash.

She shivers with exhilaration.

* * *

The music is louder than before. It fills the cell as if with a physical presence. The brass and the drums are deafening. They resonate in the small space until Moira’s head is ringing as well. She stands next to the closed door and looks at the other woman.

Lacroix wears a simple off-white baggy shirt and pants. It is the same uniform she has worn since first coming here, since after Moira stripped her during the first physical. Identical, except that now swathes of the cloth have been stained a dull and rusty brown.

The cell smells like something out of a nightmare. Moira’s spent her life around death, but even during the Crisis, at least bodies would be piled outdoors where the wind would help with the stench. There is no circulation in this tiny room. The stink of the corpse lying on the floor permeates every unbearable breath.

It’s been about two days, she knows. Two days where she was too busy on base to get away, but during which her mind was here. It is hard to restrain her enthusiasm, hard not to smile, grin, _laugh._ So well it has worked, like something out of a dream.

Today Lacroix does not rush to her. She does not even look up. She stares straight ahead until Moira grips her hair at the base of her skull and forces her head back.

“What happened here? What have you done?” She imbues her voice with all the anger and horror she does not feel.

“I—” Lacroix looks dazed. Her eyes are flat.

“What happened?” Moira repeats. She pulls. Lacroix hardly winces.

She knows what happened. The dead man on the floor is another Overwatch hostage, seized months before Lacroix during a skirmish. Finally he has met the end his comrades thought came for him all those weeks ago. It was all captured on the cell’s monitoring camera. Moira watched it over and over. The dead man struggled, but he was shackled as Lacroix was at first. She took the knife she had been given and did what she was told to do.

It was messy, so messy. So imprecise. Moira should hate that, logically. She should hate the wastefulness of it. But she watched the recording again and again and relished every second. The time for precision will come later. She will deliver the weapon Talon has requested. But for now these results are more than enough.

“They told me to kill him,” Lacroix rasps.

“So you did? You stabbed a helpless man to death because they told you to? My God, Lacroix, he wasn’t a threat. He couldn’t hurt you. You just...”

She lets her voice fade away into silent disgust. The squealing violins take its place. They fill the cell with a cacophony of joyous noise entirely unsuited for the grisly scene.

“ _S’il vous plaît_ , I thought you wanted, I thought—”

“You asked me to help you,” Moira thunders, and her voice manages to drown out the music. “Perhaps instead you should be asking if you deserve help, Lacroix. Would an innocent woman do this? Would your Gérard love a woman who did this?”

She releases her grip on Lacroix’s head with a shove. The woman falls back limply onto the bloodstained floor of the cell. She lies parallel to the man she killed. One living and one dead. One success and one failure. One lucky and one exceedingly unlucky.

Moira leaves the cell, but not the bunker. She stands outside and watches through the camera. For what nears half an hour Lacroix doesn’t move. With her hair fanning out and her clothes so bloodstained, she might as well be a corpse too.

But eventually she shifts onto her hands and knees. She crawls toward the corpse. Moira is unaware of her own body, how she leans toward the screen, how she forgets to breathe. She might as well be in the cell too. Her own self is entirely wrapped up in Lacroix’s every motion.

She comes to a halt with her thighs straddling the dead man’s hips. A pose that would be suggestive if not for the context.

They took the knife away after the deed was done to prevent her from killing herself with it, but that does not stop Lacroix. She raises her fists and brings them down again and again. She pummels the dead man’s corpse with a strength belied by her slender form and the fatigue of months of captivity. Over and over she hits him, until that exhausts what little strength she has, and then she slumps forward. Her fingers slide into the wounds she inflicted. She scratches and tears and pulls at his flesh.

Moira is transfixed. She cannot look away. She feels a sort of vindicated glee at the sight before her. Her work. Her experiment. Lacroix has never looked so beautiful.

* * *

The skies above Paris are pouring rain. The metro is overcrowded and full of wet clothing. The stench of dampness and mold and the hint of urine put Moira on edge. She pulls her coat tighter around herself and tries to breathe through her mouth. The mass of people is suffocating. She knows that the subway system was refurbished after the Crisis, but the train somehow seems a hundred years old.

She exits up into the rainy streets with marginal relief. Still there are too many people. She dislikes cities for this reason. In Zürich she is content to stay on base, where she can always sequester herself in her office. Switzerland’s beauty, too, reminds her of home. But Paris is all waste and rot and flatness. The Crisis struck this city hard and indeed burned most of it, but what rose from the rubble was less a new metropolis and more an ashen attempt to hold on to the past. The streets are still narrow and cobblestoned. It still stinks of piss and cigarette smoke.

Her shoes were not made for this weather. Her socks are sopping and the water keeps splashing up onto the hem of her coat as she navigates streets and alleys until she at last reaches her destination. The building is just like its neighbors. It could be centuries old or a facsimile from a decade ago.

She climbs the stairs as quietly as she can. Her mysterious contact inside Talon assured her that the surveillance cameras would be conveniently malfunctioning, but she’s still wary. But she reaches the sixth floor with no incident other than her calves complaining of the narrow staircase.

The door is unlocked. She opens it with a gloved hand and steps inside.

It is dark and deathly quiet. She is forced to navigate by the limited light filtering through the windows. It does not help that the apartment is messy. She nearly trips on shoes at the entryway. One pair is familiar to her because they are the shoes Lacroix was wearing when she was captured, the ones she was wearing when she was released.

There is a stench in the air like that of a barn or outhouse. Something rotten and foul. Somehow it doesn’t disturb her the same way the train did.

Moira carefully treads through the common room, past the small kitchen and the small bathroom. The door to the only bedroom is open just a crack. She pauses. In the end, it all comes down to this. Her experiment is in the room beyond, and soon the fruits of her labor will be made apparent.

It could all be for nothing.

She splays her fingers on the door and pushes. It opens without a sound.

The orange glow of a streetlamp outside pours through the broad window opposite her. It is light enough to illuminate the lovers entwined in the bed. Their forms are hidden under the sheets.

Moira walks forward.

Amélie’s eyes open slowly to regard her, but otherwise she does not move. Her arms are wrapped around her husband. She says nothing as Moira continues her approach.

Gérard’s face is unrecognizable. The sockets of his eyes are empty and bloodied. His nose has been smashed, nearly ripped off. His skin is covered in scratches deep enough to draw blood. The pillow underneath his and his wife’s head is stained black in the darkness.

“What have you done, Lacroix,” Moira says. Her voice comes out too loud in the quiet room.

Gérard is cold. The blood is dry. In what remains of his lips and cheeks she sees the signs of cyanosis. A relatively quick death, then? Was the mauling posthumous?

“He called me his swan,” Amélie says. Her voice is hoarse. “He called me perfect. He touched me.”

“He thought you were Odette,” Moira murmurs.

Amélie shudders. She squeezes her eyes closed tight. Perhaps she wishes to sleep like the man lying next to her. But she is still alive. Perhaps someday she will regret that, regret still breathing when Moira came for her. But she still doesn’t know what comes next. She never has. She is the experiment, bending to Moira’s whims.

“Overwatch will come for you,” Moira says. “They’ll find him. They’ll see what you’ve done. Do you think they’ll ever let you go? Do you want to go back to that room?”

She shakes her head violently. Her fingernails dig into her dead husband’s skin.

“I hear it.”

Moira hears it too. The orchestra seems never to leave her head either. A ghastly background track. If only she and Lacroix could be positioned together in the same act, song, note.

“Come with me. Come to Talon.”

She extends one hand.

Lacroix opens her eyes again. They look flat and dull, listless. She might as well be a corpse too.

“Why should I go with you? What is there for me?”

Moira, already victorious, smiles.

“Come with me, and you’ll never feel again.”

The pause lasts only a second. Then there is a shaking hand in hers.

* * *

 

* * *

 

“How are you feeling, Lacroix?”

The voice is more repulsive than the hands. The doctor is smooth and disinterested. She lifts the Widowmaker’s arms and inspects them with a careful eye. Her long nails trace veins. The stethoscope feels frigid where it rests above her breast.

She keeps her eyes closed so she doesn’t have to look at that face. She knows Moira’s position by her clinical touch.

“I don’t feel. Isn’t that the point?”

Moira says nothing. Perhaps she smiles. The Widowmaker does not bother opening her eyes to see for herself. If it was a test, what does it matter? Passing will earn her respite, its own cage. Failure would just be more of the same. Other people have spent years digging around in her head. They have carved her as if from a block of wood, shaving off undesirable pieces to reveal something else underneath.

And speaking of undesirables…

Moira’s hands alight on the joints where the Widowmaker’s prosthetic lower legs meet her calves and thighs. The muscle of her legs was good, they told her years ago, but her feet were mangled.

They had to go, and she let them go.

She used to love dancing. She knows that. What a foolish waste of time.

Moira gives her a tap on the knee and then turns back to her tablet.

“You’re in excellent condition,” she says briskly. “You’ll be fine to deploy to King’s Row. I have confidence you’ll perform perfectly.”

The Widowmaker sits up and stares out the window to her left. When the examination began there was sunlight spilling through the chateau’s high windows, but now storm clouds have covered the sky. Wind makes ripples out on her lake. Rain will preclude her from shooting outside. It will be the simulations again, and she doesn’t like those. They are much too sterile. Impersonal.

They lack the real thrill.

“Thank you for your time, Doctor O’Deorain,” she says. Moira finishes gathering her things and offers a smile as cool as the words.

“Of course.”

The sound of her drone lifting off startles a flock of ducks swimming placidly on the water. They take wing and outpace Moira’s craft for a few instants before it reaches proper speeds. Then the doctor is gone, whizzing over the horizon, back to existing merely as a silent threat.

The Widowmaker watches at the window for a few more minutes. She waits to see the pair of mute swans that frequent her watery backyard. They don’t appear. She doesn’t know why she bothered to think of them in the first place, and she turns away.

Odette’s tank is a tiny haven of light and warmth in the chateau’s master bedroom. She’s half-buried under one of her hides before the Widowmaker’s careful fingers scoop her up. Her many legs twitch in annoyance at being disturbed, but her mistress pays her no mind. The Widowmaker returns to her own bed and lies down there, letting the spider go where she wishes.

She can feel each hairy leg as Odette explores her naked body. She cannot offer the warmth of the tank’s heat lamp, or even that of a normal human. But eventually the tarantula finds a warm spot in the Widowmaker’s armpit and she settles there.

Can the spider feel the slow pulse of her heart? The minuscule rise and fall of her languid breaths? Does Odette know that she is a living being too?

She was a novelty at first. The Widowmaker visited the shop and discovered that the sight of the arachnids brought her no discomfort. She asked to hold one and it was the same. She ended up bringing it home and letting it crawl over her. Soon enough the lonely manor had two mistresses rather than just the one.

She is still waiting for the moment when the brush of Odette’s furry legs makes her jump back in repulsion. She is waiting to see the spider as the hideous thing it is. She is waiting to feel again.

The afternoon stretches before her. There are simulations to be run. Correspondences to be responded to. Preparations to make for the assassination of Tekhartha Mondatta.

But there is also the constant lethargy of her modified body. The gentle rhythm of rain beginning to fall against the window. Another living being cuddled beside her.

So she closes her eyes and drifts.

* * *

She’s dizzy and disoriented and the rapid speed of the craft doesn’t help. Autopilot brings her up into the skies above London and then they’re racing out over the Channel. She puts her head in her hands to try to stifle the rush of vertigo, but it doesn’t help. Her breath comes out as shallow panting. She can feel every pulse of her tachycardic heart beating as if it’s trying to shatter her ribcage.

A single bullet to the head. Mondatta dropping like a stone. It really was an exquisite shot, as smooth as silk, but she couldn’t even enjoy the rush thanks to that brat interrupting her. The only pleasure she ever gets and it was wrenched away. She’ll make her pay the next time.

If there is a next time. She can’t even daydream about revenge in her current state. It is a struggle just to wrench open the compartment next to her seat. The syringe shakes in her fingers as she pulls the cap off. Perhaps it will be too late this time and the adenosine won’t be enough to slow her heartbeat. Perhaps she will die in an auto-piloted Talon craft on her way home.

Perhaps she should feel something about that.

She remembers that if she goes, there will be nobody to feed Odette. So she grits her teeth and forces her quaking hand to steady for the instant necessary to thrust the needle into her bicep and push the syringe down.

“ _Why? Why would you do this?”_

Mondatta’s would-be savior had looked so distraught. Her youthful face had constricted as if the shot had hit her instead, as if omnics could even feel pain. He was alive, as far as machines go, anyway, and now he’s dead. Like a switch. Nothing to cry about.

Something grotesque flickers at the edge of the Widowmaker’s mind: a foul stench. Blood covering her hands and caked under her nails.

A crash of cymbals portents the arrival of the whole orchestra, and then suddenly she wishes she hadn’t injected the adenosine, that she’d jumped from the drone and fallen like Mondatta or the girl.

_I don’t feel; isn’t that the point—?_

The communication line on the dashboard crackles to life. It’s difficult to force her eyes to focus, but she reads the name and manages to hit the screen.

“Widowmaker here.”

“ _You were late._ ”

She rolls her eyes and immediately regrets it; the motion makes her dizzy. Of course that’s all he cares about, the precise details of the matter. Never mind that he’s not the one with a heart about to explode, not the one who landed a mid-air shot on the target after a fight across the rooftops of King’s Row.

“I had interference.”

“ _You were supposed to be in and out. Now there will probably be footage to deal with._ ”

“Then make Sombra deal with that. I killed him. Do it yourself next time if you don’t feel my work is adeq—”

She runs out of breath. For a few seconds her chest aches and she feels paralyzed, but then she can breathe again in short little gasps.

Reaper, at the other end of the line, pauses.

“ _What kind of interference?_ ”

“ _Watch_ the _footage_ ,” she manages, wheezing, and then she hangs up with another press to the screen. Her hands aren’t shaking so much, nor is the vertigo overtaking her. The adenosine is making a difference, though her breath is still short. Probably she should call Moira, but she thinks of the doctor’s reprehensible touch on her skin and thinks better of it.

It’s not twenty seconds after she hangs up on Reaper when the screen lights up again, and the icon shows it to be someone the Widowmaker wants to talk to even less. At least she had the courtesy to bother not just hacking into the speakers. The Widowmaker hits the screen and resigns herself to the inevitable headache.

“ _What a shot, ara_ _ñ_ _a._ _Almost got sick, to tell you the truth, swinging through the air like that—_ ”

“As I recall, only one of us was swinging, and it was not you.”

Sombra laughs, totally unbothered.

“ _Hacked into your visor. I like the best seats, you know?”_

The brass section bellows along in a thunderous allegro. She is on a stage, sweating and in pain, underneath too-bright lights.

“ _Would have given you a heads-up, but I didn’t want to distract you._ ”

Her feet are in agony. They are not the cybernetic limbs she has now, but bone and flesh. Blisters and blood. She spins and spins and wants to scream, but instead she smiles out to the audience she can’t see.

There is a smile and a cool voice telling her to behave herself and a tiny box of a room…

“ _Hey!_ _A_ _tención! Don’t make me hack into the cameras in there too. You all right or what?”_

Her feet lack nerve endings. She is not dancing. She is not onstage. She is in a Talon drone on her way back to the chateau. No longer a prisoner or a performer. She is free.

“Did you call for a reason?” she grates.

“ _Okay, ignore me. Heard your call with Gabe and wanted to confirm that was former Overwatch agent Lena Oxton, aka Tracer._ ”

Overwatch. A three-syllable word that rings in her head like cymbals. This is shaping up to be a horrible night. It was supposed to be enjoyable. A bullet through the head. The most fun she’s had in a while. The elusive feeling of heat sparking in her gut and traveling through her whole body. Pleasure.

Instead now there is just her pounding head and reminders of things she has very effectively stifled.

“She anticipated us?”

“ _Mm, don’t think so. Probably would have alerted Mondatta’s security team, and there wasn’t any sign of that. I’d call it luck. Still, she knocked you around a bit._ ”

The Widowmaker bristles at that.

“I did not end the fight slammed into a brick wall.”

Sombra laughs. “ _Dios, you’re so easy it’s not even fun. Anyway, I’ve got shit to do. Congrats again; it really was an incredible shot.”_

The connection ends with a _click._ The sudden silence feels like a vacuum. There is only the engine rumbling as the drone closes the last stretch. Home. Darkness and shadow.

She wishes the fight had lasted longer. She wishes there hadn’t been interference at all, and she could have enjoyed the feeling of the kill sizzling inside her like a live wire. She wishes that _Tracer_ had gunned her down. Or that she’d won, like this, and then her heart had given out.

* * *

Dark clouds shroud the hills around the chateau. Snow has begun to accumulate on the grass and in the woods. It’s much too cold to be outside, but it isn’t windy. Huge white flakes drift lazily downward and melt on the water. Perhaps the snowstorm will delay her invited but undesired guest.

Her breath comes out as steam.

Here she is in France, but it might as well be Russia again. It might as well be the day before, the day she missed a shot.

She sees Katya Volskaya in her mind. She’s replayed the scene countless times: her visor, Widow’s Kiss raised and steady, the figure walking steadily into the crosshairs and toward an unwitting end. The alarm had been unexpected, but it shouldn’t have impacted her that much. She has hit much harder targets in much worse conditions.

But she missed.

She is a weapon. She has been made to kill. But her target lives and her mind is wavering. She is uncertain, anxious, _afraid._

Outside, on her lonely balcony, she raises her arms above her head and rises onto her toes.

It comes so naturally it scares her. How long has it been? Why is she doing this? She doesn’t even have to think about the next steps; muscle memory takes over. She pirouettes and dips into a graceful bow. There is less strain than she remembers. Her feet do not hurt. There is tension in her calves, but it is not unpleasant. It feels as familiar as the rest of this. As if she was made to do this.

She was made to kill.

“ _Lacroix, leg higher! Shoulders down—”_

“ _I must say it’s an honor to be able to work with you; I’m such a fan—”_

“ _Oh, Am, you looked as beautiful as a swan up there—”_

The voices clamor in her head. The memories amplify as she dances. Her heart speeds up and the fear doesn’t lessen, but she keeps going. She puts her feet in front of one another, performing for nothing but the lake.

What is she doing? Why is she groping in the dark? There will be no answers in the foolish pastime of a woman she no longer is. Her anticipated visitor will bring answers and silence and peace with her spidery fingers and cold smile. There is no use at all in this—

She jumps and catches herself. She flings her arms wide and brings them back in. The balcony is too small to take the place of a stage, but she conquers it nonetheless. Her movements become frenetic. This is not a dance for an audience. It is just her, alone, moving because it feels good and feels familiar and if she stops moving her mind will keep going anyway.

Her heart thuds faster and faster.

She is Odile wearing a mask and Odette watching helplessly through a window and Siegfried about to make the worst mistake of his life she is onstage and people are standing to applaud she is lying in bed with a man lying in bed with a corpse squeezing his throat until he stops moving

“Lacroix.”

She did not hear the drone landing, nor the footsteps approaching, but she hears her old name. She stops at once. She stands and shivers while her heart speeds on.

“What are you doing?”

Moira’s voice is colder than the snow.

“It is none of your concern.”

Two can play at that game; the doctor is not the one with a body temperature closer to a platypus than a human. She’s just the one who made the Widowmaker that way.

“Come inside, then,” Moira says curtly.

She takes a step as ordered, but it is a mistake. The sudden movement makes the exertion catch up to her. Suddenly the frantic pounding of her heart is not so easy to ignore. The vertigo comes in a rush and she sways in place. When she extends a foot to catch herself, it slips on the wet stone of the balcony.

Moira does not catch her. She wheels off-balance for a few seconds, and then she falls.

Her head cracks hard against the pavement. She can’t breathe. Lights pop behind her eyes.

“What are you doing?” Moira asks again. Derisive. Mocking. She takes deliberate steps forward until she is standing above the Widowmaker and looking down. There is not so great a difference in their heights upright, but at this angle she might as well be a giant.

And the Widowmaker, with the same furious energy that gripped her when she was dancing, _hates_ her. She wishes for a brief and burning instant that she could stand and push her down, push her over the edge of the balcony, watch her struggle and sink and disappear under the water forever—

But she can’t. She can’t move. And she knows, as Moira leans down and takes rough hold of her, that she’s only angry at herself anyway.

Moira takes her to the master bathroom and undresses her. She sits on the counter and leans against the mirror and watches Doctor Frankenstein go about her work. Her head pulses and aches; when she languidly reaches her fingers up they come away red and sticky. Undoubtedly it will make a mess of the mirror, and she can’t be bothered to clean. The stain will linger for months.

The adenosine comes first. Moira is not gentle with the syringe. She won’t look the Widowmaker in the eyes, won’t speak. The disapproving weight of her silence speaks for her.

“I missed.”

The Widowmaker is the one to break the silence. Her voice slurs a little, surprising herself. Is she concussed? Broken worse than before?

Moira still says nothing. She jerks her patient forward to get a look at the back of her head. Her fingers impatiently move hair out of the way; when her fingernails graze the wound, the Widowmaker involuntarily flinches.

“I didn’t kill Volskaya. I missed.”

“I _know._ ” Moira is pressing something to the lesion that stings and prickles. The Widowmaker digs her fingers into her leg to brace herself.

“Why did I miss?”

“I don’t _know._ Why _did_ you?”

Her words hurt almost as much as her fingers. The Widowmaker is silent then, because she doesn’t have an answer. She was desperately hoping for one.

“I’m going to suture this. It will hurt. Hold still.”

She does not call it a punishment. She doesn’t have to. They both know that she has anesthesia in her bag as well as methods of biotic healing far more effective than stitches. But it doesn’t matter. She is less a doctor treating a patient and more a handler training a dog.

So the Widowmaker sits in the ancestral home of Amélie Lacroix, the most beautiful cage she has ever known, and she does not wince or cry out as Moira O’Deorain digs the needle in and pulls the thread through. She just lets her head hang limp.

She waits to be fixed. She waits for Moira to sew up her head and the leak that has let fear and doubt and despair out of her like blood.

* * *

The stage is Castillo. The Overwatch team is there to poke around an old Blackwatch hideout. They are still groping about in the past, looking for the answers that will make sense of the present. They want all the pieces that explain what happened to their old commanders, what happened in the explosion, what will happen next.

Sombra got her hands on the transmissions and Akande ordered a counter-operation. Himself, Reaper, and the Widowmaker would be there. Extermination. The Overwatch team will not leave Castillo alive. The hideout will explode. The nascent Overwatch will face a crippling blow from which it will not recover.

So clean in theory. Just like Volskaya Industries. Just like Tekhartha Mondatta.

And it goes wrong. Of course it goes wrong.

The explosion rips through the quiet night and the Widowmaker waits dully to hear the confirmation over the radio. Instead she hears Akande issuing terse, rapid orders for her and Reaper to deploy. The detonation was premature; their communications have been compromised somewhere; the team came better-prepared than expected.

She shifts into position on her rooftop of choice. Smoke rises from four blocks over; car alarms and sirens are blaring and people are shouting. The police will show up soon, but that will be Overwatch’s problem, not theirs. She presses herself against the shingles and raises Widow’s Kiss. Akande and Reaper will funnel the targets toward her, and she will pick them off. Clean and easy. She longs for the rush again.

There is a streak of blue light on the street below that she recognizes at once. She catches a glimpse of Tracer’s bright yellow ensemble through the scope, but then she’s gone. She scans the street as quickly as she can, but it’s no use; she can’t pin her down. And like the inability to swat an irritating fly, the failure grates on her. She feels too energetic, on-edge. She wants to pull the trigger.

She _needs_ to make up for her failures.

“ _Watch the sky,_ ” Reaper growls without warning into one ear. “ _We’re dealing with two of them down here. Get the Raptora._ ”

She begins to turn her attention skyward. She begins to voice an affirmative. But the concussion blast hits her before she can do either thing.

She’s falling. The propulsion came from behind. She imagines the exact trajectory as she plunges downward. The building is only three stories. She turns in midair and aims, her grip on Widow’s Kiss never faltering.

The shot misses the Raptora pilot by no more than three feet, but it might as well be a mile. She hits the ground an instant later. The impact goes through her whole body, but the shock absorbers of her prosthetics take the brunt of the blow. She doesn’t bother to straighten before she gets her bearings through the scope.

It is through the scope that she sees the next rocket.

There is no time to grapple away. She is frozen in the few milliseconds before it makes impact.

The blast sends her flying backward. Widow’s Kiss falls to the ground. She hits the brick wall of the next building _hard_ and crumples to the ground.

There is static in her ears, whether from the communicator or the blow she can’t tell. She pushes onto hands and knees and gropes in the dusty rubble for her rifle. A child looking for a lost toy. She needs it. She needs to hold onto it, even if her head is spinning and she can’t breathe and there is blood filling her mouth—

“Amélie.”

The voice sounds muffled through the fog of her addled brain. She filters it out. It is unimportant.

“Amélie Lacroix!”

A room with too-bright, sterile lighting. Hands on her body. Hands on her feet. Sawing and cutting and replacing nerves with electrical wiring, making a machine of a person.

She looks up.

She sees the barrel of the pistol first, a handful of meters away. Almost point-blank range. Then she sees Widow’s Kiss lying out of reach. And then she takes in the woman pointing the gun at her and blocking the way out of the alleyway.

She has seen her before, and the recognition brings with it many other things, as did the voice. She grits her teeth and fights the urge to spit blood onto the stone.

“Doctor Ziegler,” she says, a name provided by the woman she no longer is.

“What are you doing here?” Angela Ziegler demands. Her wings illuminate the dark space. Even without that golden light, the white of her uniform seems to glow. She is pristine. An angel, perhaps, but to the Widowmaker she seems more like the human embodiment of a hospital, all white and sterile and just the same as a certain other doctor.

The answer to her question is so obvious that the Widowmaker can’t help but scoff.

“A welcoming party. Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

“You! Why _you_?” She takes a step forward. The Widowmaker’s attention darts back to the pistol in her hands. She is a weak woman, or at least a gentle one. She will not pull the trigger.

“I go where I’m ordered, the same as yourself.”

“How long have you been Talon? I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it! You killed Gérard, betrayed all of us—”

She snaps. The taste of blood is too strong in her mouth. Her head is ringing with its phantom orchestra and with the lingering impact of the stone.

“Betrayed you? _I_ betrayed _you?_ Gérard gave me over to them! You all let me rot! Where were you, _Mercy,_ when I was alone in the dark?”

She sees the hands holding the pistol tremble and the Widowmaker takes her opportunity.

Ziegler, as expected, does not pull the trigger. She does not pull it even as the Widowmaker lunges forward and grabs onto her wrist to bend it back. She cries out and her hand falls open and the little gun drops. Then the Widowmaker is scooping up Widow’s Kiss and grappling up, up, onto the roof of the next building and then the next.

The Raptora is probably in pursuit, but now she’s just running. Overwatch is bound by the desire to minimize casualties and property damages; rockets are less than ideal in these narrow streets. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t try to think too hard.

But she remembers, unbidden, sitting in a cot in the medbay of the Swiss base an eternity ago. Angela Ziegler looked the same back then, but she had been smiling. She would inspect Amélie’s feet with gentle hands and then carefully apply whatever treatment she’d deemed most fitting.

_She abandoned you—_

_She helped me—_

_She left you for dead. They all did!_

_She cared, she cared—_

_You’re a fool if you believe that._

She finally stops her wild dash when the streets grow too tight and narrow to allow for pursuit. She hunkers down on a roof and wills her pounding heart to still. No adenosine until she’s back on a transport. Perhaps her heart will give out here.

A streak of light in the sky catches her eyes. Instinctively she swings up Widow’s Kiss and focuses through the scope. There’s the Raptora, and trailing behind her with golden wings spread…

Mercy’s floating. They both are. At the whims of gravity. A red dot moves slowly onto that blond head. A squeeze of her finger and Angela Ziegler’s life will end in the night sky above Castillo. It is easy. The shot is lined up.

_Pull the trigger._

She doesn’t.

_Pull the trigger._

She can’t.

_Pull the trigger, Lacroix._

Her finger is frozen.

_Would an innocent woman do this? Would your Gérard love a woman who did this?_

Why can’t she stop thinking? Why can’t she stop feeling? She is not Amélie Lacroix. She is the Widowmaker. She is a machine. A weapon. She is made to kill and she must pull the trigger or she is defective, irreparable, beyond help.

Widow’s Kiss clatters down onto the shingles. She collapses in on herself and screams silently as her heart pounds and her world fractures.

* * *

“ _Hey, I got them._ ”

Sombra doesn’t announce her intrusion onto the Widowmaker’s laptop microphone. Gone one second, there the next, like a shifting of light. It doesn’t matter; the Widowmaker doesn’t jump. She’s been sitting at her desk and staring out the window for what seems like hours. Spring has come to Chateau Guillard. Around the lake the trees are turning greener and greener. A few wildflowers have peeked through the earth of her garden. Decades ago there was a gardener. Decades ago the flowers were trimmed and orderly and beautiful. Now, just like the rest of the place, the gardens languish.

She moves her hand up from stroking Odette, nestled comfortable and safe in her lap, to address the hacker’s message.

“Thank you.”

“ _Pretty easy. There’s a lot of stuff in there. It’ll look like porn to the network, but delete ‘em when you’re done with them if you don’t want to get caught._ ”

“I’m not an idiot, Sombra.”

“ _Well, excuse me. Had to tell Moira what a VPN was a few years back, you know. I feel like a glorified IT tech._ ”

“Because you are,” she says impatiently. She is eager to be done with the conversation. She wants to watch the videos. She needs to watch the videos.

“ _Yeah, thanks. Anyway, I have your word?_ ”

“I’ll delete them.”

“ _Cool. See you._ ”

Her little skull icon disappears, but the Widowmaker has no doubt that she could still be listening in. She probably watched all the video before sending it forward.

The folder has been neatly dropped onto her desktop as promised, innocuously labeled _September._ The Widowmaker stares at the screen for a few seconds as if bracing herself before clicking it open.

The footage is remarkably high-quality. She can see every centimeter of the little metal box as she could for the months she was trapped there. She waits with something leaden and expectant filling her. She does not know what answers she will find here. Probably nothing at all.

But she watches as Amélie Lacroix is bundled into the cell by hostiles wearing nondescript black uniforms. The woman onscreen is alien to her. Her cheeks flush red and her eyes spill over with tears in a pathetic display. She screams at her captors, swears, offers useless threats.

The Widowmaker knows how the story ends. It is... _irritating_ to watch the woman struggle against the inevitable. Perhaps she had imagined there would be grace in it, that she would take the punishment then as she takes it now.

The music is playing, she realizes. The dulcet tunes of the orchestra are not merely the ingrained memories that have haunted her for years. This, rather, is the inception. She has not listened to actual recordings since; just the thought reminded her too strongly of _this._ But now she remembers something else too. She remembers the stage and the costumes. She remembers performing.

She enjoyed dancing. She loved dancing. She remembers these things as facts. She cannot remember the feeling.

She loved Gérard.

When the woman on the screen begins screaming, it almost drowns out the orchestra. The Widowmaker knows what they are doing to her. She traces her right forearm where the electricity left white scars arcing like lightning across her skin. The tattoo was to cover them.

She watches the face distort in pain. She screams and screams until her voice grows hoarse, until they throw her into the corner and leave her alone in the cell.

The Widowmaker scrubs forward through hours of the footage. She doesn’t need to watch Amélie lie prone in the corner of her cell for hours. Every now and then the guards return. Less frequently they bring food.

Then there she is.

Her white coat stands in contrast to everything else. So clean. So neat. Unaffected by the raw brutality of what she is wrapped up in.

The Widowmaker watches Moira O’Deorain and her lackeys strip Lacroix down. This is disgusting. This is horrifying.

But she doesn’t feel anything at all.

It goes on. As Sombra said, there are hundreds of hours of footage contained here. The Widowmaker fast-forwards through long stretches of Lacroix sitting alone in the box. She watches every second when the red-haired doctor pays her visits.

_I am trying to help you._

It is unsettling to her how little of this she remembers. Even watching it does not bring all the memories back. It is, like much of her past, a black hole, a void to get lost in. The footage feels like a movie. A biopic of someone else’s life, or a heavily-edited version of her own. She is, of course, not the same person as the one pictured before her. But the body is hers, isn’t it, and the experience?

Night has long since fallen when she reaches the climax of the recordings. She watches Lacroix drive the knife into the other prisoner’s chest again and again. Red spatters across the cell. She can smell it, taste the memory of it on her lips. She cannot remember the man exactly, nor what it felt like to murder him. But she can remember the blood.

She is too focused on the sound of the videos to hear the approaching craft at first. Only when she can actually _feel_ the rumbling does she look up. Odette shifts in her lap. The spider’s been out much too long; she really should go back in her tank—

She carefully lifts Odette in one hand and stands to look out the window. A dull feeling, like the pulse of a bruise, goes through her. That’s a Talon ship hovering over the lake, coming in for a landing on water.

Of course. She failed in Castillo. This was the expected outcome. She has lost the right to the luxurious cage at the chateau. They will drag her back to a cage or a lab. They will run electricity through her and keep her in the dark and make the music play until she cannot remember her own name.

Widow’s Kiss leans idle against the wall. She is reaching for it before she catches herself.

What does she intend to do? Fight them? Gun down her fellow Talon soldiers? This is what she wants. They are coming to fix her.

She sees the soldiers, five of them, exit the ship. They are wearing all their gear. Do they expect her to be dangerous? And then she sees the last figure exit the ship, tall and lithe and white-clad in the darkness.

The pain goes through her again.

She could not run if she wanted to. This body was not constructed to run. Perhaps Doctor O’Deorain should be congratulated on her foresight. She just sinks back in the chair and closes the lid of her laptop and waits for them to take her.

Moira is the first to enter the room. Her eyes, red and blue, stare daggers through the Widowmaker.

“Come, Lacroix.”

Lacroix. To everybody else in Talon she is the Widowmaker. A killing machine. A not-quite-human extension of her rifle. But Moira enjoys the reminder of who she was.

A different noise is echoing in the Widowmaker’s head now. Not an orchestra playing music that was pleasant once upon a time. Just the screams of a woman trapped and tortured in a tiny box.

She stands up slowly. She is still holding Odette in one hand.

“I need to put her away,” she says. The words come out slowly, hesitantly. A child asking permission of a mercurial parent.

“Give it here,” Moira says, proffering her monstrous right hand.

The Widowmaker obeys, as she has been trained to do. She sees it happen like she is outside herself:

lifting her hand with the little creature who has been her companion for years now,

placing her in the outstretched claw of the woman who has turned her into what she has become,

watching the hand clench and the shadowy energy billow up from around it,

seeing the spider twitch and twitch violently, horrifically, until she stops moving,

watching Moira turn her hand upside down to let the motionless body fall to the floor,

hearing and feeling the _thud_ as Odette makes contact.

She moves without really thinking about it. Widow’s Kiss is in her grasp, the barrel extended, muzzle pointing directly at Moira O’Deorain’s red eye. But she doesn’t pull the trigger. As it has been for all these past months, when the moment comes, she cannot do it.

“What are you doing?” Moira lifts her chin and stares down the gun, haughty as ever. She is convinced that the Widowmaker will not shoot her.

And the Widowmaker despises her for being right.

The pack of Talon agents join them a few moments later. They wrest the gun from her hands. She struggles, fights uselessly against their gloved hands, but there is no use. They wrench her wrists and one hits her _hard_ across the face.

“The ship?” one of them says, looking to Moira for confirmation.

The doctor shakes her head.

“Hold her down.”

They force the Widowmaker onto the floor face-first. She goes limply. There doesn’t seem to be much use now in struggling. There never was. There just were impulsive, stupid actions that have earned her retribution.

With her head turned to the side, she sees that she’s just a few centimeters away from Odette. She watches and watches and waits for the tarantula to move, for a leg to twitch, for her to scurry under the desk and to safety.

She doesn’t.

Moira kneels down on the floor beside her. She cuts the Widowmaker’s shirt off with a scalpel and tosses the ruined pieces aside.

“Don’t worry; this won’t do any permanent damage,” she says. Crisp. Businesslike. And almost before the Widowmaker has a chance to wonder exactly what’s about to be done to her, she feels the scalpel dig in.

She gasps. She can’t help it. It _burns_ and it _doesn’t stop,_ it just goes _on_ and _on,_ a line of pain like _fire_ down her back and she bites her lip, can’t move at all, can’t do anything but feel it and look at the spider lying dead on the ground so close to her.

The first incision seems to last forever, but given Moira’s skill it surely couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. The Widowmaker doesn’t really understand until Moira lays the first strip of flesh in front of her eyes and she sees the ink-stained skin that used to reside below her shoulder blade.

Moira is taking her tattoo.

“This will help with the pain and healing. But you deserve it. You know that, don’t you?”

The Widowmaker does not respond. But a few moments later there is a soothing coolness on her back. It diminishes the pain. A biotic treatment, no doubt. And though it helps, it does nothing to numb the next incision, nor the next, nor the next…

A month after Moira cleared her and Talon let her go free for the first time since she murdered her husband, she had gone to a tattoo shop in Paris. She went just before closing and cajoled the woman into accepting the job with a frankly ridiculous sum. She went back for each session. The artist did not ask about her skin or about the scars she was covering. The Widowmaker had appreciated her discretion. When the tattoos were finished, she put a bullet through the woman’s head and left her body in the Seine.

Moira was furious. She did not say much, but the Widowmaker knew it from the curl of her lip and the furrow in her brow. She hated them.

And now, as the gruesome pile of flesh in front of her grows little by little, as the screams from the video echo in her mind, the Widowmaker understands why.

Moira is not content just with her back. She finishes ruining that canvas, leaving the Widowmaker’s skin itching and _wrong-_ feeling as biotic healing always does, and goes on to her arm.

The Widowmaker drifts. Her cheeks are wet, as is the floor beneath her. She does not scream. Her lip is bleeding, bloody, chewed and sore. She still gasps, groans, but she will offer Moira no more than that.

* * *

The room is filled with light. The sheets match the walls and floor. White, all white. Soft and comfortable against her bare, blue-tinged skin.

The other half of the bed is empty; Gérard has gotten up already. He was never a morning person, but Overwatch demands it of him. Now even when he comes back to Paris to be with her, he gets up early and goes to bed late and proffers smiles that never reach his eyes.

It is pleasant. She could lie there for hours and wait for him to return. But she slides her legs out from under the covers. The floor is tile. Her prosthetics click against it. She pauses a moment to look out the window at the water and buildings of Oasis. Beautiful, though not particularly her style.

There is music drifting through the apartment. She rises onto her toes almost without thinking. The metal and wires of her artificial feet are better-suited to this task than her flesh-and-blood ever was. She was made for this.

Outside of the bedroom an open door leads into an office. At the computer console sits the person who is the center of her universe. She wears a button-down open at the top, more casual than she usually ever looks. She looks up at the sound of footsteps, smiles, and stands.

“Amélie.”

She crosses the office. _Click. Click._

“I thought we should start over from the beginning,” the red-haired woman begins. But then a cool purple hand is sliding around the back of her neck, and their lips are pressing together, and her words are lost.

They break apart. It feels good, so good. The music plays on from another room.

“ _Viens_ , _mon coeur._ ”

“My swan,” Moira murmurs. “My perfect swan.” She traces her lip with a deadly fingernail. It is sharp, sharp like her scalpel was, and sharp like the _thud_ of Odette’s body on the floor, and like Gérard’s words all those years ago.

She takes Moira’s hand in hers and leads her back to the white bedroom.

This is a lovers’ scene. She is already Moira’s. She has been Moira’s for years. So it makes perfect sense to push her down onto the pillows and straddle her and unbutton the shirt the rest of the way. There is a hand around her waist, nails digging into her bare skin. No resistance at all.

And very little resistance, at first, when cold hands close around her throat.

She thrashes. She is larger than the Widowmaker, after all, even if her frame is all skin and bones. But the Widowmaker has gravity and she uses it. Her thumbs press into Moira O’Deorain’s windpipe _harder_ and _harder—_

Gérard’s legs are flailing. His arms are uselessly trying to pry her off. The life is draining out of him.

The man on the floor of her cell goes quickly with the help of the knife. Blood coats her hands and splatters onto her face until she can’t smell or taste or see anything else.

Moira struggles. Her right hand pulses, tries to draw the energy out, but she doesn’t have the strength to maintain it.

“I was made to kill,” the Widowmaker says soothingly, calmly. Her thumbs _dig in._ “I’m perfect now. Your work is done, Minister.”

Her mismatched eyes seem to bulge out of her skull. Her skin goes pale and then paler and then blue-tinged like the Widowmaker’s own. She does not stop moving, not even as the motions grow feebler and feebler and the life goes out of her like it has gone out of a tarantula and Tekhartha Mondatta and Gérard Lacroix and each and every one of the Widowmaker’s victims.

And just like the rest of them, she goes still. She lies pale and cold with only the hair for color.

Security will be coming. Talon or Oasis or Overwatch or the whole world. They will bring her to justice. The Widowmaker needs to destroy the body, to ensure that even the best doctor in the world will not bring Moira O’Deorain back from the dead.

But first…

The oboe trills its encouragement. The flutes join in. The orchestra comes together to welcome Amélie Lacroix to take the stage. So she leaves the dead woman behind and steps onto the floor again.

She will throw herself into it. If her heart doesn’t give out first then she can throw herself from the window and plummet to a watery death in Oasis’s artificial sea. A fitting grave for a swan.

But first she spreads her arms wide,

_how are you feeling, Lacroix?_

and rises onto her toes,

_I feel good._

and dances

and dances

and dances.

**Author's Note:**

> more like ODEADtte, amiright?! haha...hahhaaa....hm.
> 
> Comments always appreciated!


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